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PRACTICAL TRAVELER

PRACTICAL TRAVELER; When an Inmate Books the Ticket

By BETSY WADE

Published: November 9, 1997

GLORIA and Dan Bohan, who own a travel agency with offices coast to coast, a school for travel agents and a company that sells wholesale tickets and services to other agencies, have started a project to train prisoners to make computerized travel reservations.

At the end of October, 12 inmate reservationists from the all-women Leath Correctional Institution in Greenwood, a high-security prison in South Carolina, were still doing dry runs and taking tests. The women were selected from a large number of volunteers, many of them drug offenders. The Bohans, whose travel agency, Omega World Travel, has headquarters in Fairfax, Va., expected that at least one more big agency handling the travel of major corporations would be using the inmates. The Bohans will need more clients than their own agency's to sustain the project, which has been in development for several months.

The Bohans' wholesale company, Travel Wholesalers International, subcontracts many kinds of work, including reservations services, for travel agencies. Prison wages are far below market wages and there are no benefits, so such workers mean great cost savings.

Mr. Bohan stressed that no travel agency that bought services from the wholesale operation would find its individual clients plugged into the inmate reservation system without the agency's advance agreement.

To enhance clients' security, software has been created for the Bohans for use in prisons. They say it does not disclose to the reservationist the credit card number, home address or phone number of the client. These parts of the personal records maintained in computers by all travel agencies for their regular clients will not appear on the screen, they explain. The reservationist, receiving a call on an 800 number, will ask the caller's name and then deal with his or her requests. When the reservation information is complete with flight numbers and the like, the computer record will be moved electronically as a ''blind transfer'' to employees on the outside, who will have access to the full record and will print and deliver the ticket, after reviewing the inmate's work. The inmates are forbidden to use pencils or pens lest they retain data about travel plans.

T.W.A. First to Adopt Policy

The Bohans' is not the first travel company to use prisoners this way. Trans World Airlines, according to Donn Walker, a spokesman, has a reservations center employing inmates in a prison for young men in Ventura, Calif., north of Los Angeles. The center was opened in 1985 after the State of California approached the airline with the idea, he said. It has had only one security breach in that time, he said, which he thought was an enviable record.

People calling T.W.A. directly, however, do not know they are talking to prisoners. Mr. Walker said that the 40 inmates constituted less than 1 percent of the reservations staff and that if a caller asked the reservationist, ''Where are you?'' he would respond that he was in Ventura. T.W.A.'s four major reservations centers are in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Chicago and suburban Washington. The Ventura center operates 12 daytime hours five days a week.

Mr. Walker said that T.W.A. required an inmate to be enrolled in the facility's junior college before getting a job. The airline pays $5.39 an hour, of which 50 to 60 percent goes into a fund for the inmate when he is released. The rest goes into a fund to compensate crime victims and to pay prison expenses. Passenger information, including credit card numbers, is given to the prisoners.

T.W.A.'s use of prisoners was featured on a ''Prime Time Live'' broadcast on ABC News on Oct. 22. The show examined telemarketing services that use prisoners and cited the T.W.A. security breach, in which a released prisoner used a customer's credit card number to buy thousands of dollars' worth of computers and lingerie. Mr. Walker said the prisoner was arrested and convicted.

The ABC program also cited a case not connected with travel: A prisoner wrote a sexually provocative letter to a woman whose response to a survey from a company called Metromail, full of personal information, was given to a fellow prisoner to enter into a data base. Metromail has ceased using prison labor, the ABC program reported.

The use of prisoners in work projects where they deal directly with the public is controversial. The prison-labor uses discussed on ''Prime Time Live'' provoked criticism from people interviewed on the program on grounds of loss of privacy. The Travel section of The Times recently received a letter from a Minneapolis man who believed he had reached a prisoner when he called an 800 T.W.A. number. He complained that he did not want any prisoner to know -- by virtue of his having made plane reservations for certain dates -- when he would be away. He said he hung up and called again, getting a woman and continuing with his reservation.

Criticism has also come from the labor movement, which contends that unemployed people would be happy to have such jobs if they got the same training.